


Through a Glass Darkly

by MJ (mjr91)



Series: "Through a Glass Darkly" cycle [1]
Category: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Incest, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-26
Updated: 2012-04-26
Packaged: 2017-11-04 08:50:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/392001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mjr91/pseuds/MJ
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mycroft plans dinner with his brother at the club.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Through a Glass Darkly

**Author's Note:**

> Implied incest. Prequel to "But Then Face to Face".

It seemed worthwhile, I suppose, to dine at the club. The food is, after all, excellent; our former chef had moved to the Reform Club, where he made famous his "Reform" chops and their allegedly secret sauce – the one he had first perfected in our kitchens. We still had his original recipe, however, and served it on our own tables; the likelihood that a Reform Club member would ever dine at them was highly improbable. Our current chef produced a standing rib with béarnaise that had once set the Prime Minister to tears when Hubert refused to share his roasting technique. It was one of three recorded times, in my memory, that anyone attempted to speak in the dining room outside of ordering their meal, but it would have been highly impolitic to criticize Mr. Gladstone.

Aside from the food, our wine cellar is the second or third best in London. I enjoy not only a fine meal but the beverage that nature saw fit to accompany it. The teetotalers and churchgoers who vent against the drink with which their saviour saw fit to favour the guests at Cana merely insult their Lord and ruin their digestion.

We both ordered the prime rib with potatoes and new peas, and a bottle of the cellar's best Cabernet. Such a meal brings the senses first to new heights while dining, and then to somnolence as its delights lull one into a tranquility elsewhere found only in the heavens and not upon this earth. Those who grumble at our English cuisine have no cognizance of the heights to be achieved by a skilled chef favoured with a good kitchen and with the finest bounty of British agriculture.

But enough of the meal itself, except to say that when one's senses are dulled, the mind may take one of two paths. It may be dulled by the effort of digesting too much of a fine thing, and become sluggish, or it may be sharpened by the dimming of the exterior senses, in the way that a man who is blinded develops a far more acute sense of hearing than his sighted brethren. It is my experience that a good meal does more to facilitate my mental acuity than any other activity, which some might say accounts for my alleged girth. I am in fact not that stout – nor, for that matter, am I that slim. 

My guest, however, is – and not from a lack of gastronomic sensitivity, for his palate is nearly as refined as I have allowed mine to become – far more slender, probably due to his obscene habit of taking exercise. A more loathsome activity than exercise I cannot begin to contemplate. When he fails to eat, he becomes, far from slim, quite gaunt and unhealthy-looking. It was after one of his so-called adventures during which he had overextended both his physical faculties and his tolerance for derivatives of the Columbian coca plant, while failing to take nourishment, that I began to insist he dine with me regularly in order to rebuild his strength.

During the course of those dinners, I had come to appreciate many of his attributes I had long forgotten. His strength, nearly equal to my own but honed through his efforts at baritsu. The elegance of his movement, caused by that same baritsu training – for without it, his figure would have continued to move in that awkward gait which had so marred his adolescence. 

Should I mention his hands? He is a violinist, after all, and favored with those slender, strong hands, long-fingered, that make for deft movement on the strings of that instrument which most closely approximates the voice of a Melba or an Adler.

Curse that Adler woman – a distraction to him, if ever there was one. He is capable of great singleness of mind, and I would prefer that mind – as well as those hands – be turned with purpose upon one more worthy of him than she. 

Yes, those hands. Hands I would dare imagine upon me, here, there, and then upon all of me, as I would imagine his mouth.

For he deserves someone who is his equal – and I alone am capable of being that equal. No one else can follow his mind as I can, or appreciate his quirks of character, or share his dreams – for they are mine as well, are they not?

But it does me no good to contemplate those things as we dine, for his acuity is as sharp as mine, and he would detect my mental wanderings and known them for what they were. Instead, I am determined to exercise my post-prandial mental imagery for after drinks, when he retires to his home in Baker Street and I to my own flat, where I might imagine that my own hand was his, and the words in my head the whispers from his mouth to my ear.

Yet if his thoughts and mine are as alike as they always are, if we are as alike as we always have been and shall be, these shall not long remain mere phantasms, for his wanderings must also bring his intimate dreams to turn upon me at some point. And then mere imagining need be no more, for we shall know in actuality what is but a dream for now. Now we see as through a glass, darkly, but then face to face…

"Come, brother – we have a most excellent port tonight, and we may converse over it for a bit in the Strangers Room."


End file.
